Top 5 CDN Services For WordPress

Your website is a source of establishing communication with your customers and thereby, you would like to create a website that is user friendly and at the same time represents your company’s professionalism and ethics. For popularising your website designed via the most powerful website creation tool called WordPress, you need to improve your search engine rankings through appropriate keyword content, social media optimisation, etc. But did you know that your search engine rankings may decline if your website loads slow?

If your website does not load in 3 seconds, then you need to take measures to optimise its loading time on all kinds of devices. In case you have a WordPress website, then CDN (Content Delivery Network) plays a crucial role in bringing a catapult in loading speed.

What Exactly Is CDN?

Content Distribution Network or Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a large distributed system of networks delivering cached static content from websites to users based on geographic location. In simpler terms, whenever a visitor views your WordPress website or blog, then they are redirected to  the web host’s server, which is located at any particular location. When large number of visitors access your site through this single server, then there are high chances that the server can be overloaded with the high traffic, which may cause your site to load slow or may even crash.

In order to avoid making your site slow due to viral traffic, you need to depend on CDN services as it is a network of servers that are dispersed across the globe. Moreover, CDN converts your static content into cached data and is stored in all the multiple servers. When your content is stored in geographically distributed servers, then your website is capable of loading pages faster at the visitors’ end.

How Is CDN Helpful To Boost WordPress Website?

Now that you know what CDN is, then the first and foremost benefit for your WordPress website is in terms of high loading speed. Secondly, you can protect your site from getting crashed. If you are effectively using social media and other WordPress features effectively, then you are assured to get heavy traffic to your site, which may cause excess load on the server. But when you have CDN services on your website, then your website responds incredibly despite of the exponential traffic.

Since your website loads faster, your visitors will enjoy exploring your site and you will notice lower bounce rates and increased page views as CDN services enhances the user experience. You might already know that the results on search engines highly depend upon how faster the websites load. If your site loads faster, then this will surely affect your SEO rankings.

If you are highly impressed about the results rendered by CDN services and you want to install them for your WordPress website or blog, then you need to have a look at these top 5 CDN services for WordPress:

1. MaxCDN

With widely spread server locations encompassing strategic spots in USA, Europe, Asia Pacific region and South America, MaxCDN is one of the most preferred CDN services for WordPress websites. It is being currently used by some of the highest authority sites such as WP engine, WP beginner, jQuery, Yoast, etc and MaxCDN offers its users variety of plan options.

Though MaxCDN builds and maintains the network, it gives full authority to the users to operate the control panel. Users can easily purge content, generate reports regarding usage and even amend the content to be cached in different locations. You can even ensure high security of your website by enabling two step authentication and if you have any issues with MaxCDN services, then a team of support engineers are available 24/7 to provide you with viable solutions.

While you can have instant access to analytics, you can also avail origin shield feature to protect your origin server from overload request and with EdgeRules, you can have a look at how your content behaves on every MaxCDN edge server. With custom or shared SSL options, MaxCDN offers to secure your website traffic directly from the edge. If you want to know the potential of MaxCDN services, then you can first try its free test account and then you can choose among various plans that start from $9 per month for a 100GB plan.

2. CloudFlare

Speeding up your site gets way easier with CloudFlare CDN services as they assure to make your website load super fast due to intelligent page delivery system optimisation. It protects your website from abusive bots and crawlers that waste bandwidth and server resources while efficiently blocking spams, threats and other attacks that can adversely affect your best performance.

While speed and security are CloudFlare’s topmost features, it also aims to provide high loading speed on both mobiles and computers even if your website comprises of ad servers or third party widgets. Also you can easily access the analytics presenting your website’s traffic, threats and search engine crawlers.

The basic CloudFlare plan is available for free but if you wish to have features such as mobile optimisations, web application firewall, virtually real time statistics, Railgun web optimisation, 100% uptime guarantee, multi user access, etc., then you can opt for pay plans such as $20 per month for Pro, $200 per month for Business and $5000 per month for Enterprise plan.

3. Rackspace

Rackspace provides you with sophisticated expertise in running your website at super fast speed. It is highly reliable to provide your data and other contents to the end users. Rackspace has its server locations in different corners of the world such as Hong Kong, Sydney, Chicago, Dallas, Northern Virginia and London.

With simple provisioning through the Rackspace Cloud Control Panel, users can enable CDN services on their websites within seconds and no professional services, raising tickets or phone calls are required to get your site CDN enabled via Rackspace. This CDN service provider also ensures that your website and applications are secure by absorbing all kinds of edge requests whether they are harmful or not. Your website traffic hence, won’t be affected during an attack as CDN will be dealing with it through edge nodes. You can set access rules that are enforced through edge nodes that can assist you in knowing who sees your content.

With an impressive uptime of 99.9%, your users can have an easy access to your web files. Rackspace CDN service ensures that each file is written in three different storages and there are dual power supply systems to run the servers. With plan price starting from $0.10/ GB per month, Rackspace has designed various plans for different users and for different locations too.

4. Incapsula

Through intelligent caching and content optimisation tools, Incapsula is a highly popular CDN service provider that delivers full site acceleration via its globally distributed network of servers. Incapsula is dedicated to provide instant and high speed service for users with different needs such as online stores, SaaS business or on-demand video streaming. Its application aware CDN is designed to perform dynamic profiling on website resources and identify all cacheable content that helps in increasing the speed of the content delivery.

Incapsula offers a wide variety of load balancing methods to control the distribution of traffic across all the servers and maximise application performance through real time server health and performance checks. It makes use of an advanced client classification technology to keep away spammers, threats, hackers, etc that overload the servers and steal potential information. To make your website highly secure, Incapsula makes managing and controlling multiple logins easier and gives you full control of who and what can access your site through granular filters. For simple websites and personal blogs, you can opt for the basic package which is offered for free and if you want enhanced features, then you can go for the premium plans.

5. Amazon CloudFront

Amazon CloudFront is an ultra advanced CDN service provider that clubs all the Amazon Web Services (AWS) to speed up distribution of your static and dynamic content through a worldwide network of data centres. Amazon CloudFront aims to offer lowest latency, i.e., time delay, high data transfer speeds and no minimum usage commitments.

Amazon CloudFront allows you to have complete control on who is accessing your content with its feature called private content. You can even use your own domain name and SSL certificate through custom SSL certificate support that delivers content over HTTPS. With Geo Targeting, you can easily know from which location users are accessing your website and with Geo Restriction, you can also block or restrict content to be accessible to users of any location.

CloudFront also features custom error responses, dynamic content support, management console, live media streaming, TTL setting configuration, access logs and enables tracking trends in data transfer and requests via usage charts, analysing viewers report and cache statistics report, etc. You can create a free account for availing basic benefits of Amazon CloudFront and if you wish to optimize your website with highly advanced CDN features then you can go for premium plans that has been devised separately as per locations.